As time goes by

When I was at university in the 80s, I took notes by hand, and rewrote them at night struggling to decipher my feverish scrawl at the small desk behind the door in the room I shared with my sister. My sister surrounded her bed with a ring of salt to ward off evil spirits which she feared may have come in with the black bag of bones I had brought home for my Anatomy studies.

But I digress. Back in the day, it was acceptable to hand in assignments which were "neatly hand-written" if you didn't have access to a typewriter. Computers were still a dream, like democracy.

My dad owned a small grey Olivetti typewriter. Every evening he would sit at the kitchen table and pound away at the black keys using two fingers to write his reports or exam papers.  The tick-tack-tick-tack rhythm of the machine interspersed with a “cling” and a “swish” as he got to the end of the line, was calming, like a bedtime story, when we were too old for a nightly installment from “365 Bedtime Stories”. Sometimes, when he wasn't busy, I would get to use it for a special assignment, correcting paper at the ready...and carbon paper for copies.

I was thinking about this while trying to decide what courses to do this year, now that I am planning to charge up the brain cells. “You can look everything up before you go to register,” said my daughter. For once she didn't roll her eyes at my technological challenges as she downloaded the faculty handbook and guided me through the 400 pages.

“Are you sure you need to go to orientation all day?” she asked. “You’ll probably find your way around just fine.” Well, having not spent any significant time on the main campus the first time around, I do need a bit of help trying to “navigate the administrative maze of post-graduate studies”. I would hate anyone to have to spread salt to still my spirit if it takes to rambling around the ivy-covered buildings!